Earlier this week, while researching something totally unrelated, I was transfixed by a judicial opinion written March 27 by Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago in a case involving something called "nutriloaf."

Judge Posner, 73, is perhaps the most influential jurist in the country not seated on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Ronald Reagan named Judge Posner to the appeals court in 1981. He has written 31 years worth of appellate decisions and more than 40 books. He blogs at two different sites and teaches at the University of Chicago Law School.

Robert M. Solow, a Nobel prize-winning economist, once observed, "Judge Posner evidently writes the way other men breathe."

He drives people looking for consistency crazy. He is an economic conservative who is sometimes a social liberal and sometimes not. The breadth of his scholarship is staggering. For Judge Posner to be writing about nutriloaf was like Michelangelo painting a bathroom.